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The invasions of the barbarians; supremacy of moral power over brute force; Totilaand Benedict: the Rule of Benedict;
monastic missionaries: translation of the Psalms into Scla- vonic; the Psalms in the lives of Columban, Gall, Patrick, Columba, Cuthbert; Irish and British Christianity-Battle of Mold, Kentigern, Bangor; Roman Christianity-The island of Death and Silence; Gregory the Great; coming of Augustine; introduction of Benedictine Rule; its foundation on the Psalms; its establishment in England-Benedict Biscop, Wilfrid, Neot, Dunstan; universality of the Rule.
MEN needed all their faith in the eternity of "the City of God" during the successive invasions which, in the fifth and sixth centuries, swept over Europe. The siege and capture of Rome (410) by Alaric and his Arian Visigoths, thrilled the civilised world with consternation. The news, as has been noted, stirred Augustine to write his De Civitate Dei, with a psalm for his motto. Jerome, in his cave at Bethlehem, wrestling with the difficulties of the Prophet Ezekiel, found in a psalm the best expression for a horror which, as he said, made him forget his own name: " 0 God, the heathen are come into Thy inheritance; Thy holy temple have they defiled, and made Jerusalem an heap of stones" (Ps. Ixxix.). In rude contrast to the solemnity of this universal lamentation was the sensa- tion of relief, which, according to the popular story, the event produced upon the Emperor Honorius. "Rome has perished!" cried the panic-stricken messenger, as he hurried into the emperor's presence. "Rome perished!" replied the imperial poultry-fancier, who had a favourite hen called " Rome";
" impossible! an hour ago she was feeding from my hand."" It was explained that it was the City of Rome which had been destroyed. " But I thought," said the relieved emperor, " you meant that it was my bird, Rome, which I had lost."
Alaric and his Arian followers spared Christian churches and those who had found refuge within their walls. But what shelter was there from the savage glance of Attila's small bead-like eyes, as his squalid Pannonian hordes swept over Europe (441-51), leaving in their track a blackened and deso- lated waste ? A panic-stricken world saw that the weapons of the Christian faith alone availed against the hosts of evil.
ALARIC AND ATTILA 39
Priests were not indeed always spared. Nicasius, eleventh Bishop of Rheims, was cut down by a Vandal in 407, as he stood on the threshold of the church, chanting the words, <( Quicken Thou me according to Thy word " (Ps. cxix., verse 25). Paris may have owed security to insignificance rather than to the prayers of St Genevieve. But there is better evidence to prove that Orleans was saved by St Aignan, Troyes by St Loup, and Rome by St Leo. Divine interposi- tions on behalf of the Church and her saints were magnified by the legends which clustered round the name of Attila, the Flagellum Dei of theologians, the "Etzel" of the Niebelungen Lied. The inroads of the Huns stimulated the spread of Christianity, for the barbarian was awed by the priest alone, and the instruments of God's wrath trembled only before the agents of His mercy. It was then that Paganism lost its hold on the Imperial City, when Pope Leo refuted the plea that Rome owed her downfall to desertion of her ancient gods. It was then also, that the foundations of the Papal Empire were firmly laid, when the successor of Peter triumphed where the successor of Caesar had ignominiously failed.
But among the barbarians and the native races, the sense of awe in the presence of the supernatural was thus deepened by the events of the invasion. Living examples of Christian charity, like Deo Gratias, Bishop of Carthage, or Cesarius, Bishop of Aries, who spent their substance in the redemption of captives, passed the comprehension, yet commanded the respect, of the invaders. Trusted mediators, like Epiphanius, Bishop of Pavia, won their confidence. An Odoacer bowed before the spiritual insight of Severinus of Noricum, the mys- terious prophet and apostle of Austria. A Totila-as the story is told in Spinello's frescoes in San Miniato at Florence-paid homage to the saintly character of Benedict of Nursia; and the spell which the Patriarch of Western Monasticism cast over the all-conquering king testifies, with silent eloquence, to the supremacy of moral power over brute force, and strikes the prelude to the illustrious life of the Benedictine Order.
Driven from the wild gorges of Subiaco by the evil devices of his enemies, Benedict found a retreat at Monte Cassino. There he established among a pagan people the capital of the monastic order. The temple of Apollo was overthrown; the sacred wood was felled, and the faith of Christ preached to a people who, two centuries after Constantine, and in the heart of Christendom, still worshipped the gods of ancient Rome. Dante has told the story (" Paradiso," canto xxii.):
" In old days, That mountain, at whose side Cassino rests, Was, on its height, frequented by a race Deceived and ill-disposed; and I it was Who thither carried first the name of Him
40 THE FORMATION OF NATIONS
Who brought the soul-subliming truth to man, And such a speeding grace shone over me, That from their impious worship I reclaimed The dwellers round about, who with the world Were in delusion lost."
" From the heart of the Benedict, as from a fountain-head of Paradise," flowed the monastic life of the West. Monte Cassino was, as it were, its Sinai. From it issued the famous Rule of St Benedict (528), the code under which lived the vast majority of those who embraced the monastic discipline of labour and obedience.
Shortly before his death, the great monastic lawgiver saw in a vision, as Pope Gregory relates, the whole world gathered together under one beam of the sun. Five centuries later, it would be true to say that the vision was realised in the obedience of the monastic world to the Rule of Benedict. But for the moment, no uniformity existed. Here, as in Southern Italy, prevailed the Eastern Rule of Basil; here, as at Lerins, the Egyptian Rule of Antony or of Macarius; here, as in Spain, the Rule of Isidore. Gradually the continent was covered with monastic missionaries, who carried Christianity among the pagan provincials or heathen barbarians, bridged the gap between the old civilisation and the new, and, in countries devastated by wars and rapine, practised the arts of peace under the sanction of religion. In such missionary enterprises the Celtic saints were nobly distinguished. Now, in the spirit of Antony and the anchorites of the Egyptian deserts, the storm-beaten islands of the Atlantic Ocean were tenanted by eager solitaries, who, by day and night, from year's end to year's end, amid the roar of the waves and the wild screams of seabirds, sang the Psalms to God. Now, in another aspect of the same religious fervour, men left their wattled chapels, their stone oratories, and wooden shrines in Ireland and Scotland, to carry the Gospel message to the heathen. Columban at Luxeuil and Bobbio, Gall in Switzer- land, Cataldus at Tarentum, Virgilius at Salzburg, Donatus at Fiesole, were among the Celtic saints who made their influence felt in Western Europe from Iceland to Southern Italy.
It was by a text from the Psalms that the first translation of the Scriptures into a language " understanded of the people" was sanctioned by orthodox Christianity. Methodius and Cyril desired to construct an alphabet, and to translate portions of the Bible into the Sclavonic tongue. Their request was referred to Pope John VIII. m 879, and it was justified in his eyes by the words, "Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord " (Ps. cl., verse 6). In the Sclavonic language, and in the rude alphabet, which still witnesses to the Byzantine origin of the Russian religion and literature, the whole of the New
USE BY MISSIONARIES 41
Testament was translated. From the Old Testament the Book of Psalms alone was selected. No one can doubt the meaning of the choice, or that it was wisely made. For missions, especially to pagan peoples, no book is better adapted. In the first place, Nature is treated in its unity rather than in its detail; it is contemplated in great masses:
it is painted not as self-subsisting or glorious in its own beauty, but as the living expression of the one God, the embodiment of one overruling spiritual power. No book, again, appeals so strongly to the simple elemental feelings, the universal eternal emotions of mankind; no book relies less upon the special forms of human opinion to which different ages and varying circumstances have given their transitory mould. No book, again, is so calculated to encourage that sense of awe before the Divine invisible omnipresence which gives its sanction to the voice of conscience. In the poetry of Homer, the Deities of Olympus in three paces traverse the uttermost bounds of the earth; and to this material omni- presence Plato added moral grandeur by his conception of the ubiquitous supervision of Divine Providence. But the splendour of the thought, as imagined by the Greek poet or philosopher, is only a pale reflection of the sublimity of the idea as it is represented by the Hebrew Psalmist. In Psalm cxxxix. the beautiful blossom bursts into the full glory of the flower. On its language is modelled one of the earliest fragments of missionary teaching; " 0 Lord, my thoughts," it runs, " cannot elude Thy thoughts; Thou knowest all the ways by which I would escape. If I climb up into heaven. Thou dwellest there; if I go down to hell, there also I find Thy presence. If I bury myself in the darkness. Thou findest me there. I know that Thy night can be made clear as my day. In the morning I take flight; I flee to the ends of the sea; but there is no place in which Thy hand reaches me not," etc. The sentiment is that which prompted Linnaeus, the Swedish naturalist, to inscribe over the door of his lecture-room, "In- nocui vivite: Numen adest." It is the same also which, in an utilitarian, prosaic age, is coldly paraphrased in Thomson's " Hymn ":
" Should fate command me to the farthest verge Of the green earth, to distant barbarous climes, Rivers unknown to song, . . . 'tis nought to me;
Since God is ever present, ever felt, In the void waste as in the city full."
To learn the Psalter by heart was, in monastic life, the first duty of a novice. Among the secular clergy, knowledge of the Psalter was the threshold to preferment. A council of the Church and the capitularies of an emperor, provided that no one should be raised to any ecclesiastical dignity who could
B a
4a THE FORMATION OF NATIONS
not recite the whole book. By the Psalms were sustained the lives and deaths of the men whose spiritual daring converted Europe to Christianity. Above the mists of legend, through the pictured veil of romance, one fact shines out with pene- trating, steadfast light. It is the strength that, in solitude or danger, missionary and monk, secular priest and anchorite, derived from the Psalms of David. The words lived in his mind ; they were ever on his lip; in them, his thoughts were unconsciously clothed; in them, his cry for help was naturally expressed. Take, for example, the stories, legend or truth, of two great continental missionaries, the Celtic saints Columban and Gall.
Like Francis 6f Assisi, Columban wielded a magnetic power over wild creatures. At his call squirrels leaped from the trees to nestle in his bosom, or chase each other in the folds of his white scapular; birds, as he knelt in prayer, fluttered round him and perched on his uplifted hands, or on his Bible as it hung by a strap from his shoulder; to him a bear gave up its cave .for a retreat; a raven confessed its crime, and restored his stolen gloves. With a psalm, he and his colleague, Gall, the apostle of Switzerland, exorcised the demons of Bregenz. There the two Irish missionaries had established (circa 610) a little colony of Christians, living by the labours of their hands. The Lake of Constance swarmed with fish, and Columban made the nets, which Gall cast into the waters for a draught. One night, as Gall watched silently in his boat among his nets, he heard the demon of the mountains calling aloud to the demon of the waters:
" Arise! " he cried, " help to chase away the strangers who have driven me from my temples. It will need our united strength to thrust them forth."
" What can we do ?" asked the demon of the waters. " Here is one upon the water-side, whose nets I have tried to break; yet have I never succeeded. He prays always, and never sleeps. Our labour will be but lost. We shall avail nothing against him."
Then Gall made the sign of the Cross, and, hurrying to land, roused Columban, who straightway tolled the bell for midnight prayers. Before the first psalm was sung through, the yells of the baffled demons echoed in fury from the sur- rounding hills, grew faint in the distance, and died away among the mountains like the confused sounds of a routed host.
Another incident in the life of Gall serves to connect with the Psalms the choice of the site of one of the most famous monasteries. Columban had left Bregenz (612), and Gall determined to seek another home from which to preach the Gospel. As he wandered through a forest, he came to a spot where the little river Steinach, falling from the mountain,
ST PATRICK 43
hollows itself a bed in the rock. Here Gall, stumbling over a bramble, fell. His comrades strove to raise him; but he bade them leave him, for " This," he cried, "shall be my rest:
here will I dwell, for I have a delight therein " (Ps. cxxxii., verse 15). So was founded the great monastery of St Gall, renowned for its library, its learning, and its cultivation of the arts.
Coming nearer home, we find in the legendary history of St Patrick a noble use of the verse, " Some put their trust in chariots, and some in horses; but we will remember the Name of the Lord our God" (Ps. xx., verse 7). Every third year, at the spring equinox, which closed the Celtic year, the festival of Tara was held on the great plain of Breg. Here were gathered the five kings of Ireland, the twenty-five tutelary kings, their attendants, their warriors, and their chariots. In nine triple circles, as night fell, they took their places round the huge flower-strewn pyre, which rose on the terrace of the palace of Tara. Throughout all Ireland, every hearth was cold. The people v/aited to rekindle their fires from the sacred flame which descended from heaven upon the pyre.
Suddenly, as the vast throng was hushed in anxious ex- pectation, a bright light shone out on the extreme verge of the plain. "Who," cried King Laeghaire, in his rage, "has dared to commit this sacrilege?" And all the counsellors, the bards, the judges, and the nobles answered, " We know not." But the chief of the Druids cried aloud to Laeghaire, " 0 King, if that distant flame be not now extinguished, it will never be put out. Before it our sacred flame will pale, and the man who has lighted it will destroy thy kingdom. Over thee and over us he will bear rule, and he and his successors will reign for ever in Ireland." Then the king ordered the Druids to seize the sacrilegious wretch, and bring him to Tara. So the Druids, with their chariots, their horses, and their spearmen, set forth on their mission. They found that the light was shining upon a little altar set up in a rude hut, and before the shrine knelt white-robed men in prayer. They were St Patrick, his twelve priests, and the boy, Benignus, who were celebrating their midnight service to welcome the dawn of Easter morning.
The Druids dared not enter. Standing without, they bade the men come forth. Patrick obeyed the summons, and fol- lowed the Druids to the palace of Tara, chanting as he went, " Some put their trust in chariots, and some in horses; but we will remember the Name of the Lord our God." Before the assembled hosts he spoke of the Kingdom founded by the King of kings, and of Him who reigns from the Cross. With words of such power did he speak, that nature was hushed in stillness; the ebbing tide ceased to sink; the branches stirred
44 THE FORMATION OF NATIONS
not in the woods; the eagle checked his flight; the white stag of Mulla, bending over the stream, forbore to drink. The power of the Druids was broken. As day dawned, the magic circles were dispersed, the sacred pyre was cold, and the only flame that shone through the twilight was the altar-fire which the Christians had kindled to hail the resurrection of their Lord.
In the career, both legendary and historical, of Columba, to whom, and to whose spiritual posterity, Northern Britain owed its Christianity, may be traced the power of the Psalms. Born in 521, at Gartan, in Donegal, Columba died in 597. His life thus spans the century which preceded the landing of Augustine in England.
On the stone ofLacknacor, in Donegal, Columba was born. As the great missionary gave up his native land for the love of God and of human souls, so those who sleep a night upon this stone are cured from that home-sickness which is the anguish of emigrants. When Columba knew only how to' read the alphabet, he was able, as an old life of the saint records, to say the Psalms by heart. The priest, Cruithnechan, who had baptised him, was called upon at an ecclesiastical festival to recite the Psalm (ci.), " My song shall be of mercy and judgment." Memory and voice failed him; but, in the place of his guardian, the child repeated the Psalm, and thus " the names of God and of Columba were magnified by the miracle."
On the shores of Strangford Lough, Columba became a pupil of St Finnian. There, so legend tells us, he copied his host's Psalter by stealth, shutting himself up by night in the church where the book was treasured, and writing by the light which streamed from his own hand. Finnian claimed the copy; Columba resisted the claim. The dispute was referred to the king at Tara, who, in homely phrase, gave his decision against Columba: "to every cow her calf": to the book its copy. In/defence of his treasure, Columba armed the clans, and Diarmid was defeated at the bloody " Battle of the Psalter." Under the name of Cathac, or " The Battler," the O'Donnells, for centuries, carried to their battles the silver case containing Columba's reputed copy of the Psalter as a pledge of victory.
In 563, Columba left his beloved oak groves of Derry, and with twelve companions, drove his hide-bound coracle on the shores of lona, at the spot still known as " the bay of the osier bark." From lona the "island soldier" pushed his missionary enterprises, for more than thirty years, among the Picts and Scots, and ruled the numerous churches which were founded in Ireland, Scotland, and Northumbria. In June 597, Columba had reached his 77th year. Worn with age and labour, he knew that his end was at hand. He had
COLUMBA .45
gone to bless a distant barn belonging to the monastery of lona. As he rested on his road home by a wayside cross, on a little hill, there came to him a white pack-horse, which carried the milking vessels from the cow-sheds to the mon- astery. Laying its head upon his shoulder with many plaintive moans, it gazed into his face with eyes filled with tears. The attendant would have driven away the faithful mourner, but Columba forbade him, saying, "Let be; it so loveth me, that it poureth its bitter grief into my bosom. Thou, being a man, and having a rational soul, canst know nothing of my departure hence, save that which I myself have told thee. But to this brute beast, being devoid of human reason, the Creator hath revealed that I, its master, am about to leave it." So saying, he blessed the pack-horse, which went sorrowfully away.
Returning to his cell, he sat there transcribing the Psalter. When he came to the loth verse of Ps. xxxiv., " The lions do lack, and suffer hunger; but they who seek the Lord shall want no manner of thing that is good,"-he laid down his pen. "Here," he said, " I make an end; what follows, Baithen will write." As Adamnanus comments, the last verse was fit for Columba, who should lack none of the treasures of eternity; and for Baithen, who succeeded him both as a teacher and as a writer, it was fitting that he should write the words that followed, " Come, ye children, and hearken unto me:
I will teach you the fear of the Lord " (Ps. xxxiv., verse n). After vespers, as was his wont, with the bare flag for his couch and for his pillow a stone, Columba passed the early hours of the night. As the bell tolled for the nocturnal office of the morning of Sunday, June gth, he rose, and entered the church before the brethren. Diarmid, his faithful attendant, drawing near to the door, saw that the building was flooded with a heavenly light, which disappeared as his foot touched the threshold. Greatly wondering, he asked, "Where art thou, my father ? " Then, groping his way through the dark- ness, he found Columba lying before the altar. He raised the saint's head, and sitting beside him, laid it on his bosom. Thus they were found by the brethren, and then, as Diarmid raised his master's right hand, Columba moved it in sign of blessing, and so passed away.
lona became for the Celtic races the cradle of sacred know- ledge, the nursery of bishops, the religious capital of Northern Britain, the burying-place of its kings. "Where is Duncan? " asks Ross of Macduff, and Macduff replies:
"Carried to Colme-kill:
The sacred storehouse of his^predecessors And guardian of their bones." 1
1 Macbeth, Act II, scene iv.